The X-mas Files – ‘festive’ UFO caught on camera

CRAIG BROWN

TO the untrained eye it looks like a luminous spinning top or Christmas bauble glowing in the night sky. But UFO experts are hoping that this mysterious picture might assist them in their quest for extraterrestrial life.

The unidentified flying object was spotted over Pitlochry in Perthshire last week by Adrian Musat, a chef from Romania.

The 40-year-old first noticed the object when he looked out of his window at 7:30am on 5 November. He managed to capture a series of images on his video camera before it vanished 40 minutes later.

At 5pm the same day the alien-like object reappeared, hovering above Clunie Wood and emitting a “pulsing light”. Mr Musat took more pictures on his mobile phone.

Now the pictures and video have now been passed to the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) for verification.

Mr Musat, who lives with wife Nicolete, 39, and their two-year-old son Alex in the town’s Walker Court, said: “I was looking at the view out my window and I saw this light pulsing about a mile away. It wasn’t on the ground but floating above the trees and moving left to right.

“I expected it to fly away but it eventually just disappeared, as if it switched off.

“Around 5pm I saw it again. For about 25 minutes I saw a small red cloud above the object. All the other clouds were moving across the sky but this one stayed over the object all the time. It stayed until after 6pm. It didn’t make any noise.”

Mr Musat, who works as a sous chef at Victoria’s restaurant in the town, said the UFO looked to be around five metres wide and changed in colour.

He added: “When I looked more closely at the footage on my laptop I could see it was floating above the trees. When I told friends they said they too saw a light that evening.”

Matt Lyons, of BUFORA, said it was a “bonus” to receive video footage rather than just photographs. He said: “Investigation has commenced and I will be contacting the witness shortly.”

Alien investigators were called into Tayside following a sighting in Angus in December.

A disc or wedge-shaped object was photographed hovering in the sky above the county, but BUFORA later dismissed it as a “moon dog”, a type of ice cloud that is usually invisible.

The Pitlochry area has become a hotspot for Scottish UFO sightings, with one image taken of flying saucer over the village of nearby Calvine in 1990 described by a former government UFO investigator as “the most compelling evidence” he ever saw for extraterrestrial life.

But Nick Pope, who ran the government’s UFO project from 1991 to 1994, cast doubt on the latest spotting.

He said: “I’m a little sceptical on this one. Many diamond-shaped UFOs turn out to be caused by a camera effect. When people zoom in on a bright light source, the iris opening creates a diamond-shaped image which is effectively superimposed on to the light.

“So there was undoubtedly an unusual light in the sky in the first place, but it wasn’t diamond-shaped. That’s just a photographic effect, but these sorts of images cause a lot of excitement in the UFO community.”

In addition to this Highlands hotspot, in the Central Belt, the ‘Bonnybridge triangle’ is renowned for UFO sightings. Between 1992 and 1994, there were more than 600 reports recorded of unexplained sightings.